


You Never Can Go Back

by DaraOakwise



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22376518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaraOakwise/pseuds/DaraOakwise
Summary: Things haven’t been quite right for Team TARDIS for a while. And in the space between adventures, the Doctor and her companions contemplate the universe, home, and each other. Or—the Fam gets answers, of a sort.
Comments: 35
Kudos: 149





	You Never Can Go Back

_1 Galaxy_

Things had gone - well, badly. From the outside, the spycraft adventure shouldn’t have been different from any of the others. Some bad guys, a few moments of terror, but victory in the end. Yay.

And yet, somehow, from then on, everything had gone all crooked and sour. Between subdued visits to planets, the Doctor had taken to parking them in space and then disappearing into the heart of the TARDIS, sometimes for days at a time, for no apparent reason. Which was why Yaz found herself sitting alone on the floor one evening, leaning against in the frame of the TARDIS’s door and swinging her legs into empty space. And nursing a monster headache. They were floating in a void between galaxies, just far enough away from the nearest one that its stunning spiral entirely filled the view. Yaz wasn’t sure what galaxy it was. And she wasn’t sure when she’d stopped asking. Or when the Doctor had stopped telling.

A wheeze from the TARDIS’s central console let Yaz know she wasn’t alone in the room anymore. “Heya Yaz,” the Doctor said, crouching down behind her. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Yaz answered, trying to be pleased at the Doctor’s unexpected appearance. “Gorgeous, actually. Weird, though, from here. Almost doesn’t feel real.”

“Very real,” the Doctor murmured, and pointed out into space. “And there, just there, on that arm, see, near the edge? Home to a boring little yellow sun, and a _very_ troublesome little blue world.”

Yaz twisted around and looked up at the Doctor’s face, lit by the galaxylight. “This is the Milky Way?” Yaz asked in wonder.

“Yes,” the Doctor answered, her eyes fixed on the distant stars. “Didn’t I say?”

“No,” Yaz murmured sadly, and turned back to the view.

“You okay Yaz?” the Doctor asked gently.

There were many ways to answer that, but Yaz went with the easiest: “My head is killing me,” Yaz admitted with a sigh. “Migraine. Nothing serious. I don’t get them as bad as other people, but sometimes a trigger lines up just wrong with hormones and bam! Three day headache.”

“I could help?” the Doctor offered hesitantly.

Yaz laughed, carefully, head in hands. “No thanks. Probably involves me balancing a Jammy Dodger on my nose while reciting the alphabet backwards, yeah?”

“No,” the Doctor said softly, and sat down beside Yaz on the floor, tilting her head to catch Yaz’s downturned gaze. “You’re miserable. Just ... let me?”

Yaz hesitated, then nodded. The Doctor scooted them both away from the door so Yaz could stretch out, then tugged Yaz down until her head was pillowed awkwardly in the Doctor’s lap. 

“Ok, I’m going to touch your head with my hands now,” the Doctor said. “It will let me feel the pain. Feel? Taste? Feel-taste?” the Doctor was rambling without saying anything. As usual. “No word for it in English. Or any human language, come to it. Doesn’t matter. Yeah?” she asked, hands hovering above Yaz.

“Go for it,” Yaz said, and screwed her eyes shut. The Doctor’s hands felt, somehow, bigger than they actually were, and cold. 

“Relax, Yaz,” the Doctor sighed. “You’re too spiky.”

“I’m trying,” Yaz said, and clenched her jaw.

“You’re not,” the Doctor complained sharply, and then caught Yaz’s shoulders before Yaz could sit up in aggrieved annoyance. Yaz glared up at the Doctor, who simply lifted her hands and bowed forward over Yaz, meeting her gaze. 

“It’s me, I’m sorry,” the Doctor said, the new and worrisome sorrow carving its way into her face again. The Doctor stared melancholically down at Yaz, then closed her eyes. “Breathe through it with me?” she asked plaintively.

“Fine,” Yaz huffed, and forced herself mirror the Doctor’s controlled breathing, staring up at the Time Lord—whatever a Time Lord was. Not serene, certainly not this close, and through her pain Yaz’s annoyance morphed back to the half-panicked concern that had been sitting heavily in her heart for weeks now.

The Doctor smiled weakly down at Yaz, though her eyes were still closed, and rested a hand on Yaz’s cheek. “Stop worrying, Yasmine Khan,” the Doctor said gently, “and let me look after you.”

Yaz sighed. Her head hurt too badly to sort out the mystery anyway.

The two women sat quietly together for a few minutes, the stars of Yaz’s galaxy spinning behind them. Yaz felt herself relaxing into the Doctor’s lap, and as she did, she felt the Doctor’s breathing shift from tightly precise to meditative. Then a deep breath from the Doctor, and the Doctor’s hands were back on Yaz’s head. 

“Pain is like clouds,” the Doctor murmured. “It has curves and outlines. Find the edges …” one of the Doctor’s hands stilled, fingers splayed behind Yaz’s ear, the line of her jaw, and her temple. “...and you can contain and reduce it.” Other hand, now, searching, then coming to rest, hard, at a coiled point in Yaz’s neck. “Trouble is, it moves, pain does, and you have to chase it before it can dig in again.”

Yaz melted further under the Doctor’s ministrations. The Doctor’s hands drifted, fingers on Yaz’s hair and face. Feather light, at first, then pressing harder when the Doctor found what she was feeling for. One hand following a joint of her skull, the other resting her cheek. Then moving again—ridge of her brow and top of her scalp; above her ear; the dip between her eye and nose; down her neck to her shoulder; a trigger point in her back she hadn’t realized was drawn tight. Each time, the pain wavered, then slid sideways until the Doctor could catch it again.

Fifteen minutes in and their breaths had synchronized, but their hearts could not, the Doctor’s complex, alien four-beat thrumming through her fingers, syncopated against the double-beats of Yaz’s pulse. 

Yaz cracked an eyelid. “Shhh,” the Doctor soothed, her own eyes closed in concentration, just before Yaz opened her mouth to speak. “To answer your unspoken question: yes, slightly telepathic massage. I can’t help it, with my hands on your head. Any more than _you,_ my empathic human friend, can stop yourself feeling my emotions. Which is why we had to get ourselves sorted, you and I, before we could begin.” The Doctor opened her eyes and met Yaz’s steady gaze. “Any better?”

“Yes, much, thank you,” Yaz murmured in relief. “You’re good at this.”

“Practice,” the Doctor sighed, her touch moving from therapeutic to comforting, for both of them. “Clara. Amy. Sarah Jane. Others. Human women, generally...although, Jack …”

“Hormones,” Yaz groaned. “Stupid, you know?”

“If you say so,” the Doctor murmured. Yaz drifted for a while, limply contented to let the Doctor smooth away the last traces of her headache.

“You really always been a bloke before?” Yaz asked lazily.

The Doctor chuckled. “Yes, mostly. It’s a spectrum, but I went all out for the upgrade this time ‘round.”

“Yeah,” Yaz agreed. “Upgrade. Except for the migraines, the monthlies, and the misogyny. What’s it like? The difference?”

“On my planet …” the Doctor paused, and swallowed. “The biology and culture didn’t make much difference. Some physical changes, obviously. A bit smaller, balance a little lower. Thoughts are a little different too, drawn toward community and empathy more easily, I think, which is good. It’s nice. Always happy to learn new things.

“This body is also handy at changing minds, if the mind is already changeable,” the Doctor continued. “Some of my other faces, I had to make a big speech. This one can be a little lighter. Most beings in the universe have a crazy aunt who will talk them into following their passion for painting instead of becoming a solicitor like their sensible father wanted. Don’t study law, or enslave people, or destroy the planet, as the case may be.”

 _“‘Thank you, Doctor, that is spectacular advice,’”_ Yaz quoted.

“Yeah,” the Doctor said with a chuckle. “The trouble comes with the cruel. In fairness, earlier me wouldn’t have been able to convince them either, but they’d at least sneer through the speech. This body, they don’t even pretend to listen.” The Doctor shrugged. “I can only assume it’s the haircut.”

“It isn’t,” Yaz said wearily, and shifted. The Doctor’s lap and hands were nice, but the floor was getting hard, and the galaxy at her head, churning toward them at 600 kilometers per second, a little overwhelming.

“I know,” the Doctor huffed. “But it’s so enormously ludicrous that I won’t justify it by saying it aloud.” The Doctor cupped Yaz’s face. “Better?” 

Yaz rolled her neck experimentally, then stood. “Completely. Feeling like sleep, though.”

The Doctor, still on the floor, nodded once, then scooted forward, taking Yaz’s former place against the doorframe. “Have a soak first. Fifteen minutes, at least, in the hottest water you can stand, with the bath salts the TARDIS will get you. Otherwise you’ll ache in the morning….Thank you, Yaz,” she called quietly, just before Yaz stepped out of the room.

Yaz turned back, but the Doctor had already moved beyond her reach, just over the threshold into the void of space, balanced in the brittle gap between home and eternity, a dark shadow eclipsing a billion worlds. 

_2 Nova_

“Oh, hey Doc,” Graham said in surprise, returning to the crystalline console room with his hands full. “Sorry I didn’t close the front door. I was enjoying the view, when I thought it might be better with a thermos of tea and some sandwiches.”

The Doctor shook her head incredulously. “A supernova … improved by sandwiches?”

“Well, sure,” Graham shrugged. “Care to join me?”

The Doctor smiled fondly at him. “Yeah. Sounds nice.”

“I brought a blanket and a hamper. TARDIS had it all packed up, actually, when I arrived in the kitchen. Handy, that. Thought I’d set up a little picnic. Not _too_ close to the door, mind, doesn’t seem safe.”

“Completely safe,” the Doctor huffed, offended for the TARDIS’s sake. “We could set it up _outside_ and it would still be safe, as long as we stayed inside the force shield.”

“No, thank you,” Graham answered, and spread his blanket on the floor.

Outside, a star was dying. It’s core had already collapsed—they’d been there to see that. The Doctor had parked them just in time, and opened the door. The star had been pulsing with light, its surface writhing in a kind of agony. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was all it took, and this massive, ancient, _doomed_ thing has blown itself to bits in front of their faces. The Doctor had watched wordlessly, then turned away and disappeared somewhere else, with zero explanation, as she’d been doing. 

Ryan had looked it up on his phone, which is how they’d guessed that it must have been a supernova. It was still shockingly bright; the TARDIS had to be turning down the light so they could see it without going blind. Now, the shockwave was tearing its way through the rest of the system, all light and fury. 

Graham poured a cup of tea out of the thermos and handed it to the Doctor, along with the sugar, the majority of which he knew would be gone by the time the Doctor was done with it.

“At first I was worried this might be the Sun,” Graham said, pouring his own tea and stirring in a rational amount of sugar and milk, “but Ryan’s phone says our Sun is too small.”

“Much too small,” the Doctor agreed. “It will have a red giant phase when its hydrogen runs out, a bit of excitement consuming the inner planets, then settle in for a long retirement as a white dwarf, slowly cooling to the background temperature of the universe over trillions of years. Not very exciting to watch, frankly.”

“So what happened here?” Graham asked, gesturing to the destruction outside.

“Iron,” the Doctor said, setting her tea on the floor so she could crumple her hands together into an illustrative ball. “Nuclear fusion creating iron. That’s the end for a star. Iron fusion doesn’t release enough energy to combat gravity, so it all collapses in a fraction of a second, then rebounds out at 10,000 kilometers a second.” _Boom,_ her hands gestured. “A big star like this only gets a couple million years, ended in a moment. One of the few cosmic events that fit a human timescale.”

“It’s sad,” Graham said, with a sip of tea.

The Doctor retrieved her tea, then stood and stepped up to the threshold. “This is Earth’s nursery,” she said softly, reaching a hand into the maelstrom. “Out there, the atoms that will make your body are being scattered into a nebula. That supernova is fusing the rare elements right now, including the gold in your wedding ring. This death is also your birth.”

Graham gaped at the Doctor, and risked standing in the doorway to get a better view. He stared down at his own hand, and the ring Grace had given him, then back into space.

“You got a pickle and cheese?” the Doctor asked, wandering back to the picnic hamper.

Graham blinked, and shook himself. “Sure, yeah. Hey Doc…this all reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” He went back to the blanket, and picked out a sandwich, stalling. But it was important, and he gathered his courage. “If I die, out here, will you bring my body back to Earth?” he asked. “I guess,” he gestured to space, the general galactic neighborhood his planet would someday be, it seemed. “I guess I want to come home.”

The Doctor sighed heavily. “I will.”

“Not that I’m exactly expecting it,” Graham hastened to add, in the face of her despair. “I mean, I suppose I could get poisoned by a space jellyfish or something, Doc, but to be honest, I’ve always figured that one of these mornings, sooner than later, I just won’t wake up. I’ve been close before. I’m not afraid, but I feel it waiting, sometimes.”

The Doctor stared wordlessly out at the supernova. “It’s a funny thing, getting older,” Graham continued, rubbing his knuckles. “It occurs to you, slowly, that you’re not quite sure the last time you sprinted down a road. Or jumped in the air. Or picked up something heavy. You groan when you get out of bed, and need to know where the loo is, at all times, just in case. Words sometimes slip off your tongue. Mortality sort of … settles in. 

“I remember,” the Doctor admitted. “I’ve died of old age. A couple of times.”

Graham shook his head. “Here I sit. On a timeship. Above a supernova billions of years in the past. Eating a pickle and cheese on the floor with my mate, who’s just told me she’s died of old age, _a couple of times_. It’s a rum old universe, innit? 

The Doctor shrugged, and chewed her food.

“But you get another life, don’t you?” Graham mused. “Another go, young again.”

“Ay, well, so do you, sort of,” the Doctor answered, with a head-tilt toward the view out the door. “The atoms of your body have been a star, a supernova, a nebula, a proto-solar system, a planet, and a Graham O’Brien. They’ll go back to being a planet, someday. They’ll get reused. Recycled. Reincarnated.”

“Means I’ve been a pickle and cheese too,” Graham said, raising his sandwich. “You are what you eat, eh?”

The Doctor burst out laughing, for the first time in a long while. “You’re not wrong,” she said, and sat shoulder to shoulder with him in companionable silence, the universe being made new again while they watched.

“How old are you, Doc?” Graham dared at last.

She shot him a look. “How old are _you?_ ” she returned. “Been remembering to keep track of the time traveling days? Doing all the math? One day on Centi Four is 2.78 Earth days, and we were there for a week. We redid the New Years party on the planet Festival four different times so we could see the fireworks from different angles, so that’s the same hour repeated four times. How about the time we accidentally got frozen in that stasis pod for a month and a half, does that count?”

“Oh my God,” Graham whispered, a little stricken.

“Now, multiply that mess by years that are wiped out before they happen,” the Doctor continued, both hands wrapped around her tea. “Fractures in time caused by temporal weapons that lead to twelve simultaneous realities. Frozen time. Time loops. Pocket universes. I can tell you I’m over two thousand years old, Graham, and that’s … _technically_ true.”

Graham breathed in sharply. Two thousand years was bad enough, and even worse than he’d started to suspect. And was, he gathered, a massive lowball. “Are you older than this star was?” Graham asked quietly.

“Do time loops count, if you can remember it all?” the Doctor asked tiredly.

“I’d say yes, Doc,” Graham answered carefully.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“So … millions of years?” Graham asked tentatively, when the Doctor didn’t elaborate. _Or billions?_ Surely not.

“Over two thousand, Graham,” the Doctor said levely, and finished her tea. “Tell me. You’re this star, reincarnated and given a voice. Do you think she was ready to go, when her time came?”

“No,” Graham answered, certain. “But we don’t get a say when our time is done, stars and little men. We ain’t gods, we know our place. How ‘bout you, Doc? All the times you’ve died of old age and whatever else you’ve died of, you ever really been ready to pack it in?”

The Doctor stood, and moved back to the door to look out over the nova. “Thought about it. Never as brave as stars and little men, though,” the Doctor answered, then quoted, mostly to herself: “‘ _to sleep—perchance to dream? ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come_.’ My old friend Billy always said things better than I could.”

It occurred to Graham that the Doctor was standing alone in the doorframe, too far away for Graham to grab and only a step off into a screaming inferno. And the old bus driver, who had seen all sorts, and knew the look —plenty of high-enough bridges on his route—had to ask. “Doc…” he started gently.

The Doctor closed the door, and Graham sagged in relief. “No,” she said, and caught Graham’s eye. She patted him on the shoulder as she walked by. “No iron in my hearts, Graham, don’t you worry about me.”

“We do,” he called after her, but she was already gone.

_3 Planet_

“Ice for that knee,” the Doctor said, handing a packet of cool blue gel over to Ryan. “You’ll be right as rain in an hour.”

“Thanks,” Ryan said, disgusted with himself, again. He hated ladders. And heights. Which meant he didn’t _really_ want to be sitting where he was sitting, but hadn’t been able to hobble much past the TARDIS’s front door.

Below him, just outside and miles below his feet, they were in close orbit around the gates of hell. A planet engulfed in lava and fire. The Doctor, in her moods, was parking them in the _weirdest_ places. Ryan grimaced down at it, his twisted knee throbbing.

“Scoot over,” the Doctor commanded, misreading his expression, “and let me see that knee.”

“No wait,” he said with a protective flinch, anticipating some sort of karate chop to his leg developed by spider people to cure swollen knees, or something. Instead she was carefully untying his trainer and rolling up the leg of his trousers. She grabbed the iced gel and gave it a sharp bend. It began glowing faintly, and she quickly wrapped it around Ryan’s leg, which immediately went cool and leaden.

The Doctor shook her hands out at her wrists. “I think I was meant to use gloves to do that. Numb hands now,” she said cheerfully. “And you won’t be able to stand up for a bit until the anesthetic wears off. We’ll just have to enjoy the view ‘til it does. It occurs to me I hadn’t shown you any volcanoes yet. A bit boring, volcanoes, just sort of leaky mountains. But this …” the Doctor shrugged “is all of them at once, so a bit more interesting.”

“This is Earth, isn’t it?” Ryan asked with sudden clarity.

The Doctor grinned over him, and blew on her numb fingers. “Gold star for Ryan!”

“Ah,” Ryan sighed, deflating. “Doctor, I didn’t want to see the end of the world.”

“Oh, Ryan, this isn’t the end!” the Doctor cried, a glimmer of her usual wonder in her eyes. “This is the _beginning_. She’s just coming to be herself. She’s got everything she needs now. Still looks a right mess, all jumbled and flailing and out of sorts, but just you wait. Oceans, atmosphere, continents, life. Everything is just around the corner for her.”

“That’s not so bad then,” Ryan said, settling back against the door frame.

“No it isn’t,” the Doctor murmured, looking down between their feet at the young world. She frowned. “I had this friend once. Fierce, brilliant girl. Very first place I ever took her was the Earth’s last day, destroyed by its own sun.”

Ryan looked over at her, askance. “That’s a little dark, mate,” he chided.

“Yeah,” the Doctor admitted, and her attention drifted. _‘Dark paths,’_ Graham had noted the other day, when they were talking and worrying about her, and Ryan agreed. Dark paths where they couldn’t follow, ‘cause she wouldn’t let them . Ryan couldn’t quite see her face, turned to the view outside and hidden by the fringe of hair falling in her eyes. But he could see when she wrenched her train of thought to another track. “How’s the leg?” she asked, with forced cheer.

“Can’t feel it at all,” Ryan said. “Which is good, I suppose, as long as it comes back.”

“Oh it will,” the Doctor said. “An hour, tops. One day. Two days, at the very most.”

Ryan smiled faintly at his rambling friend, then his face fell. “I’m sorry about the ladder,” he said glumly.

The Doctor frowned at him, bemused. “What?”

“The ladder. A grown man who trips on his own feet going down a ladder. It’s stupid.”

“Ryan!” the Doctor exclaimed, brow furrowing. She glared down at the forming planet, fond and exasperated, rather than at Ryan. “Sometimes your hands and feet aren’t quite where your thought you left them, right? A bit too far away, or too close. Your brain says ‘move,’ and everything lags by a moment. Your body is yours but sometimes just … doesn’t quite feel quite like it’s really you. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said fervently. “That’s it exactly.”

“I’ve been there,” the Doctor said. “Whenever I change. Shorter. Taller. New teeth. Appalling kidneys. Halfway between what I was and what I am. For me, it always settles, in time. But for you … you're incredibly brave, you know.” 

Ryan shrugged. 

“No, it’s true,” the Doctor continued. “Facing your fears is tough enough. But facing the things that are _hard_ , the things that don’t come easily, and doing them anyway? That’s brave.”

“Just feels like living,” Ryan said.

“Brave,” the Doctor repeated, with a firm nod.

“So, the body changing thing you do? That’s actually, properly real? Do you, like, switch out?” Ryan asked after a moment.

The Doctor tilted her head. “Reformat, more like,” she said. “Matter to energy, borrow a little more energy from the universe to finish it off, back to matter.”

“That’s proper weird.”

“Tell the truth, I’m not very good at it,” the Doctor said with a laugh. “Feel like that planet, afterward.” She gestured toward the roiling Earth, then sat up and pointed out into space. “Oh look! Meteor incoming! Big one. Dinosaur-killer size, in later days. Today, just more material to work with!” They watched together as the Earth absorbed the hit, the shockwave and ejecta sweeping darkly across the world. 

“Your friend, the one you took to the end of the world?” Ryan asked. “How’d she take it?”

“Rose? Better than me. Always.” The Doctor drummed her fingers on her leg. “Feeling in my hands is back,” she announced, and stood. “Leg … nothing still, I assume?”

Ryan shook his head.

“Still healing,” the Doctor said, and started throwing at switches on the console. “Give it time. Just scoot back and we’ll be off.”

“Doctor,” he asked, with one last look down at young Earth before he nudged the door closed with his good foot. “What’s going on with you?”

She paused, and her answer wasn’t quite to the question he wanted. “My friend, Rose, who I took to the end of the world? I wanted to travel with someone who could see the end of everything, and move forward anyway. To understand that it could be survived. You lot, I’ve been taking you home, but not the way you remember. Look down on where you’re from, what made you, and realize that what you thought you knew might not be the truth, or the whole truth.”

“Why?” Ryan challenged.

The Doctor shrugged. “Home is mysterious pasts. Tragic futures. Secrets. People wearing regrettable hats. Sometimes it doesn’t sit comfortably. Sometimes,” she said, and shot Ryan a significant glance, “it doesn’t feel like it’s actually part of you. But it is.” She sighed, and input the coordinates, knowing where they needed to go next. “Where to, Ryan Sinclair, do you think?”

“Home,” he said firmly.

“Home, then,” the Doctor said, and pulled the lever.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> “[Y]ou will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore … As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home … You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” — James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room


End file.
